Wednesday, October 01, 2014

The Censoring of Mammy Two Shoes

I have never liked Tom and Jerry. It's too repetitive. Even as a very young child, it only took a couple of episodes to realize ... oh, cat chasing uncatchable mouse ... not much else going on here, is there? At least with Elmer Fudd chasing the uncatchable rabbit there was some dialogue. Another problem is that, as someone with fascist tendencies, I deplored the cat's weakness and was irritated by the mouse's flaunting of natural order. Also, I wanted to know: Why are we being expected to root for the the plague-carrying vermin that leaves a piss trail wherever it skitters? Oh right ... because Joos run Hollyweird. And thus a White Supremacist was born. That is not exactly my origin story, but you get the gist.

Tom and Jerry has even been accused of being an attempt to give the Jews a makeover, and to ameliorate negative connotations of vermin. And yet, that has not stopped Tom and Jerry from being recently scrutinized as heretical to MultiCult doctrine:

People hoping to download the 70-year-old cartoons through [Amazon's] video streaming service, previously known as LoveFilm, are confronted with the warning that they contain “some ethnic and racial prejudices that were once commonplace in American society”.

The notice is likely to refer to the portrayal of a black maid known as Mammy Two Shoes in the animated series. A thick-set, middle-aged black woman whose face is only shown once, the character is generally agreed to be a racist stereotype of a white family’s servant. “Such depictions were wrong then and are wrong today,” the Amazon warning adds.

Why are they wrong? Are they inaccurate? Falsified? Or is it simply offensive to tell the truth that old, heavy-set uneducated black women were often employed as domestic servants before the welfare state relieved said black women of the necessity of employment? So tell me, when will Amazon be putting a warning label on the poop-pie baking mammies in The Help?